


The Elvish Birthday

by XtaticPearl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Birthdays, Drabble, Elf Culture & Customs, Gen, POV Dobby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-14
Updated: 2016-10-14
Packaged: 2018-08-22 08:57:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8280179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/pseuds/XtaticPearl
Summary: Nobody had celebrated Dobby’s birthday during his life. It was laughable and ridiculous to celebrate the birth of an insignificant elf, just another servant for the lives of wizards.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fr0st6yte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fr0st6yte/gifts).



> This is part of an angst & feels challenge and I hope it hits some feels at the least :P

Nobody had celebrated Dobby’s birthday during his life. It was laughable and ridiculous to celebrate the birth of an insignificant elf, just another servant for the lives of wizards. Dobby had never thought about it during his life, having much bigger things to worry about - like the next meal he would scrape off leftover dishes or the next bruise he would have to nurse from a cruel boot.

It was a pinprick in a walking wound’s life, the knowledge that he would never know the day he was born.

Decades into his life, once he had become a sock wearing free elf, he had once caught himself thinking about it as he helped celebrate a fifth year Hufflepuff girl’s birthday in the middle of the night. He clapped as she and her friends cut the chocolate cake and remembered a long faded day in the Malfoy Manor when he had carried a similar one for his ex-young master Draco. There had been a fallen scrape of frosting that he had tasted, in a rare moment of curiosity. It was funny how he remembered the taste of chocolate just as much as the pain of his self-punishment after the act.

He never got around to celebrating his birthday as a free elf either. There was too much to do with his new life, too many young lives to protect and care for. It was insignificant.

Seasons passed and times darkened, making Dobby more aware of how precious lives were and how trivial they became in the face of countless deaths. He strived to keep the dead eyes to the minimum and helped keep his new charges alive for as long as he could. He knew his insignificance even now, but he also knew his magic’s significance. So he gave and gave, in ways he could and ways he had been told to never try by traditions of elvish bondage. 

He gave in heart, help, hearth and without hesitance because he was born for it.

And he died for it. In the last moments of his birthless life, as he took in the warmth of a young master he had chosen, as he felt cocooned in cold shivering arms that begged him to live, he wondered if his birthday had been that day. Because in those dying moments of an insignificant life, he had never felt more alive. He wished he could celebrate it, wished he could remember it better.

He couldn’t.

But the world did. On that day and on that day in decades to come.

For he had been significant after all - not as a forgotten elf, but as a remembered friend.

**Author's Note:**

> @Fr0st6yte, your move ;)
> 
> Feedback would be lovely <3


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